*** From [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Miroslaw J. Wiechowski) ----- Original Message ----- From: Frank Milewski To: Checinska, Jadwiga Sent: Saturday, August 10, 2002 1:44 PM Subject: Poland's 9/1 and Start of WW II NEWS from THE POLISH AMERICAN CONGRESS HOLOCAUST DOCUMENTATION COMMITTEE 177 Kent St., Brooklyn, N.Y. 11222 (718) 384-2584 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE August 12, 2002 AS 9/11 ANNIVERSARY NEARS, HITLER'S 9/1 INVASION OF POLAND REMEMBERED America's "War on Terrorism" began with the September 11th surprise attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In 1939, a similar sneak attack started World War II. On September 1st that year, Adolf Hitler unleashed the overwhelming air, land and sea power of Nazi Germany against the people of Poland and drew the rest of the world into a bloody killing spree that would last another six years. New York's Polish American community will mark this tragic anniversary with a solemn commemorative mass at St. Stanislaus Bishop & Martyr Church at 107 E. 7th Street in downtown Manhattan on Sunday, September 1st starting at noon. It was the first church established by Polish immigrants who arrived in the city in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Rev. Christopher Wieliczko, a member of the Pauline Order and pastor there, will be the celebrant. Churches serving Polish American communities elsewhere in the metropolitan New York area have scheduled concurrent observances. Along with St. Stanislaus, they will commence tolling their bells in mournful remembrance of the event that noon. Rev. Peter Zendzian, who heads the Polish Apostolate of Brooklyn and is pastor of Holy Cross Church in Maspeth, Queens, is coordinating the area observances together with the Polish American Congress. Commemorating the anniversary has a special personal meaning for Rev. Zendzian since his father was a survivor of a German concentration camp. "We are remembering one of humanity's saddest catastrophes World War II," Rev. Zendzian said, observing that the Germans "targeted Catholic Poland to be the first victim of a campaign to slaughter millions of God-fearing innocents." The ferocity and brutality with which the Nazis dealt with Poland was the direct result of the order Adolf Hitler gave his generals just ten days before the September 1st invasion. On the wall at the entrance to its Polish exhibit, the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. has inscribed the exact words of Hitler's barbaric command to kill "without pity or mercy all men, women and children of Polish race or language." Although World War II officially ended in 1945 with the defeat of Nazi Germany, there was no such termination of it for Poland. Communist armed forces of the Soviet Union remained in the country to back up an oppressive atheistic system that replaced the Nazis' reign of terror with one of their own. Only after the fall of Communism in 1989 could the Polish people consider their ordeal as finally over. For this reason, many Poles regard World War II as their nation's "Fifty Year War," according to the Polish American Congress. Participating in the religious commemoration at the East 7th St. church will be concentration camp survivors, veterans of the Polish Army who fought the Nazis, as well as former members of Poland's Home Army (Armia Krajowa), the largest and most effective underground resistance group in all German-occupied Europe. Many of them are members of the Polish American Congress. A reception will follow immediately after the religious ceremonies.
